The brigading of American troops with French and English commands
and the fact that the entire forces of England and Italy, as well as
America, on the Continent, are commanded by a French soldier recall
that in many past wars large forces of one nation served under leaders
of another nation. In the Napoleonic wars there were numberless
instances of these armies of composite nationality, the most striking
example being, probably, the Grand Army which invaded Russia in 1811,
in which there was only a minority of French soldiers, nearly all
Western Europe contributing the majority. But these foreign troops
served by compulsion, not of good-will. A better analogy is the war
of the Spanish succession, in which both the Duke of Marlborough and
Prince Eugene commanded composite armies, voluntarily united; this war
transferred Newfoundland and Nova Scotia from France to England. In the
wars in India, English commanders have almost invariably had a majority
of native troops in their forces, and this was conspicuously the case
in the second half of the eighteenth century, as in Clive's decisive
victory at Plassey.
Considerable numbers of French troops served under an American
Commander in Chief at an eventful period in this country's history; of
the 16,000 who forced the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown,
about half were French troops, under Lafayette and Rochambeau. A
generation later, when Napoleon was trying to subdue Spain, mixed
forces of English, Portuguese, and Spanish troops fought, under the
Duke of Wellington and his colleagues, against the invaders. At
Waterloo also the Duke of Wellington had an army of several different
nationalities under his command, though the Dutch and Belgian troops
played no great part in the later stages of the battle. In the war of
1877, considerable Russian and Rumanian armies fought under a single
commander who was, for a considerable period, Prince Charles (later
King) of Rumania.